Letting Go

Notes on friendship, ruptures and repairs, and letting go

This is me and my best friend, Jessica.

There was a time when this picture, this moment, seemed impossible. For one thing, I thought I’d never get a wedding day. Too many bad experiences had convinced me that love was nothing more than trickery and breadcrumbs and waiting to be discarded. If you were lucky, that is. Sometimes, it was something worse.

So I decided it was easier and safer to tell myself that love wasn’t real, that it was nothing more than a silly fantasy, a lie¹.

But there’s another reason this moment seemed impossible, a reason that had nothing to do with what I’d experienced in past relationships: Jessica and I, we once let each other go.

Me and Jessica on my wedding day. My husband, Toby, had just been diagnosed with cancer. Somehow, we all managed to make room for our joy and our grief. Photo by Emily Nicole Photos.

I was 10 when my family and I moved into the house that felt like my childhood home. We probably would have stayed there if not for what happened.

I loved that house. It was blue and white, and it had a huge backyard and a tire swing and a trampoline. But being there meant starting over. Being there meant that once again, I was the friendless New Kid, and this was something I did not love. And this school wasn’t like the others I’d attended; my teacher was cold, the kids were cliquey, and I could immediately sense that I didn’t belong².

Jessica was the first person, adult or child, who was nice to me. Her birthday was the weekend after school started, and she came right up to me and handed me an invitation. It was the only one I received that year. Her party was Lion King themed, and I had no idea what was going on because I hadn’t seen the movie. I was a little weirdo who didn’t like normal kid stuff like Disney or cartoons.

My favourite show was Rescue 911.

You might be thinking that my friendship with Jessica began here, but it didn’t. We shared a love interest in grade 5, you see. It was all very intense and dramatic. Then, one random afternoon, we sat together at lunch. I don’t remember whose idea it was or who made the first move. What I do remember was that Jessica had a red juice box in her hand that she never drank because all we did was laugh.

Jessica was my first real friend. She was the one who stood up for me when I was being bullied, the one who accidentally burned my forehead with a curling iron, the one who sat with me on the bathroom floor when I was scared or heartbroken, the one who told me I deserved better.

The one who was there the night my dad died.

I used to think losing my dad at 13 somehow protected me from more tragedies, statistically speaking. What were the odds something like that could happen again, I reasoned. But ten years later, my sister, Shannon, died. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say she was killed; I’m still not sure. There’s no word for what happened to her. Maybe that’s why I’ve only ever mentioned her death in passing. Like driving by a car wreck and pointing and saying, There it is… this other thing that happened.

It was in this sharp, twisted wreckage that I’d lost Jessica.

I assumed our friendship was just another casualty of grief, that it was broken beyond repair. My dad and sister’s deaths killed so many things, so many friendships, so many connections. Toby’s death has done the same.

Some of these lost relationships have been hard. Others, I am relieved to leave behind.

But losing Jessica never felt okay.

Ten years ago, we reconnected. At first, we were tentative and unsure, fumbling but honest. We could have acted like nothing happened, but we chose to wade into the discomfort together, to make a repair that was a decade in the making and long overdue³.

And I’m so fucking glad we did.

This was taken in the forest near Toby’s tree. Look at us, living and laughing alongside big, big grief. Photo By Ashleigh Wells Photography.

Friendships aren’t always convenient or comfortable. They require time, effort, care, and attention. Many, maybe even most, don’t last. People grow apart, and this can be difficult, even if it’s not always bad. But friendships can suffer other endings too.

Grief, after all, is never a story about one single loss.

The grieving person knows when they are being let go, when they have become the “inconvenient friend.” They feel themselves being pushed outside the hard edges of other people’s capacities. They watch friends, family, and would-be supporters decide things like I’m too busy, it’s all too much, someone else will surely step in. One turned back here, one disappearing act there; everyone fading out like the end of a song.

The silence, the avoiding, the excluding, the polite shunning—all these carefully chosen exits add up to a mass extinction. I used to tell myself a story about what it all meant, and in this story, it didn’t matter what I did with my grief, the mere fact that it existed suddenly made me “too much.”

I was all bashed up. No one wanted to be my friend. No one could be trusted.

For a long time, this is what I believed about myself and others.

Meeting Toby taught me I was wrong about this and so much else. Being with him taught me that love is real, that safe people exist, that I can be myself with them. That I wanted to be. Finding my way back to Jessica taught me this too.

In depths of grief, where everything is so murky and heavy and airless and cold, I know how we can start to believe that we are unreachable, unlovable. But it’s not true.

Friendships really can grow here.

Friendships, both old and new, are possible for grieving hearts.

Me and Jessica. Photo by Ashleigh Wells Photography.

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1. I was wrong, by the way.

2. For a story (with some humour) about being the new kid and not fitting in, see Garbage Bag Parachute.

3. One thing I hope you get from this story is that ruptures and repairs are part of being in relationship with others. My friendship with Jessica could have been repaired much earlier, and I wish it didn’t take me so long to realize that; however, not everything can (or “should”) be repaired. Damage can always be acknowledged and apologized for, but it can’t always be repaired. Sometimes, distance and endings are needed and appropriate.